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Making light of it Mystery Cache

Hidden : 10/2/2013
Difficulty:
2.5 out of 5
Terrain:
1.5 out of 5

Size: Size:   small (small)

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Geocache Description:

A mathematical puzzle cache - hopefully a challenge to work out the coords, and not much to find the cache itself.


The coordinates given are just nice roundish numbers. This cache is not there! To get the coordinates, you will need to solve a puzzle.

A long corridor has many lights, each with a switch. A little boy, who has clearly never been told not to play with lightswitches, and has a lot of time on his hands, plays with them like this:

The lights are all off when he starts.
He walks from the beginning of the corridor and flicks the switch for every light.
Then, he walks from the beginning again and flicks the switch for every 2nd light.
Then, he walks from the start and flicks the switch for every 3rd light
Then every 4th
Then every 5th
...
and so on, until he only flicks the switch of the last light.
And then he stops.

By 'flicks the switch' I mean if it's on, he turns it off, and if it's off, he turns it on.

There are 233,700,000 light switches in the corridor. How many lights are left on when he's finished?

The answer should be a five digit number, ABCDE

Depending on how much you like playing with maths, this may not be a trivial puzzle. There are a number of hints available as picture attachments, building up in the amount of help given. We recommend that cachers work through them in order, rather than open them all and skip to the last. Hopefully this should make it possible for plenty of people. If you still don't get it, please email us. There are two more hints, and if you'd like more help we can talk you through how to get to the solution.

To check that you haven't made a mistake, you should find that if you add the digits you get A + B + C + D + E = 23.
 

The coordinates are for where the cache is:

51deg 28.hij'N 0deg 59.hkm'W

where:

h = A + A + C

i = D - E

j = A + C

k = E

m = B + C + C

The previous location for the cache wasn't great - hopefully this new one will be better.

Additional Hints (Decrypt)

Vg'f nggnpurq gb gur srapr, npprffvoyr sebz gur jbbqf. Vs lbh ner fgnaqvat ba gur cnirzrag va sebag bs n ynzccbfg, lbh ner nyzbfg va gur evtug cynpr, tb vagb gur jbbqf naq lbh'yy svaq vg oruvaq gur ynzccbfg.

Decryption Key

A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|J|K|L|M
-------------------------
N|O|P|Q|R|S|T|U|V|W|X|Y|Z

(letter above equals below, and vice versa)